The goal of my research is to understand how word knowledge is structured in speakers’ minds, and the way this aspect of humans’ capacity for language interacts with other facets of language, society, and cognition.
My main interests center around the following three areas:
- The structure of the mental lexicon I am interested in how speakers store the words of their language and how they structure this knowledge in order to produce and understand words. I take an interdisciplinary approach to the question by thinking of lexical knowledge as embedded in cognitive systems such as memory, and exploring how this interaction leads to observed effects in language production, comprehension and learning.
- Quantitative approaches and morphological theory I use experimental paradigms, computational and statistical modeling to test claims made by morphological theories. I am interested in testing theories of lexical organisation with experimental and corpus data. I am also interested in directly modeling lexical dynamics, and testing the predictions such models make about language processing and change.
- Extralinguistic factors and morphological phenomena Considering morphological factors alone makes incorrect predictions about phenomena such as defectiveness and overabundance. I use experimental evidence to gain insights about these phenomena by adopting the framing of language as a social tool for communication.
Other things I am involved in:
- augmenting linguistic fieldwork with machine learning
- construction of curated machine-readable resources documenting languages’ morphology
- separating the effects of language inheritance and contact in the distribution of linguistic features in the world’s languages
You can find a comprehensive overview of my background, scholarship record and teaching in my CV
The Publications and Talks tabs contain the files associated with contributions listed in the CV (not all CV entries have an associated file on this website. If you are interested in concrete outputs of any particular item on the CV which is not on the website, send me an email!)